We’ve gone over the ways you can lie in Part One, but that’s only half the battle. In fiction, a bad lie kills your story; a good lie (almost always) requires you to tell the truth eventually, finds its virtue in delaying, not averting, that telling. In the end, the climax of the story must not come out of nowhere. If I said, ‘Read this; it will explain the climax,’ and it had nothing to do with the climax- or even made it more confusing- you’d be rightly annoyed. The author has to tell the truth, and he has to tell it where the reader can, if he tries, hear it. He has to establish the plot mechanics, develop the character traits, and make the promises which the climax alternately relies on and fulfils, and in this he must, however stealthily, tell the truth. Thankfully we have tools; today I’ll just brush on a few of the more important.

Genre Exploitations

I mentioned genre savvy last time; here’s where it can be really useful, not just to exploit but to channel. Genre expectations can be used both to misdirect and to allow room for misdirection. Consider, for instance, last week’s example about using the latitude afforded by a mystery story for misdirection regarding the perpetrator’s identity. That’s a prime example of free space to deceive your reader in. Once again, rule one (‘You don’t lie’) still applies, so be careful. Furthermore, genre expectations can be exploited for foreshadowing, by including a detail or phraseology that ticks the box for a certain expectation (the ‘Well, at least nothing worse can happen’ type line is possibly the most obvious example of this, even if it’s hackneyed enough to be more of a joke than anything else).

Emphasis and Its Nemesis

Next, emphasis and its negative space, subtlety, can be of immense use. Slipping in important details under the eye of the reader is an important part of setting up plot twists and developments. The detail doesn’t even always need to be hidden- sometimes it just needs to come before the context that makes it significant, so that it’s important only in retrospect. Declare¹, by Tim Powers, is an excellent example of this. The circle Hale notices on the pavement in chapter one is only notable to the reader because it’s odd that Hale noted it, but in light of later worldbuilding it becomes significant, the sort of thing that makes you say ‘aha’ when you re-read the story. Such subtleties are also very helpful for foreshadowing, as you can slip them in here and there, repeatedly, to give the reader a sense that something is coming up, something different, without spoiling the surprise entirely, getting suspense instead of surprise. Special emphasis on certain elements of the story can also be useful. Even if you don’t put explicit emphasis on it, for instance, when you’re writing a murder mystery, you want the murderer to be a character introduced at some point in the book, memorable enough for the reader to recollect them easily when the final reveal comes (you don’t want them say, “Huh? Who’s that?” at the climax).

Implication

Implication is a yet more subtle tool than just un-emphatic details. This tool is the practice of providing several facts, often spread across a significant space, which together add up to the ending, but never making it obvious that the reader should add them up. Mystery stories, of course, rely on this almost explicitly, but other stories work with this as well. In fact, it’s foundational to a well-done plot twist. Once again, I’ll reference Declare. Hale and Philby’s relationship is a subject of some interest throughout the book; you get a sense fairly early on that something odd is going on here. The reveal of what’s going on, though, takes hundreds of pages, after which, when re-reading the story, you start to see a hundred little hints of the truth. Overall, this method could be likened to giving the reader a new main battle tank, but you’ve put the tank under a blanket in a pitch black room and let them loose in there, to feel out each bit and slowly put together that this part’s kinda track-shaped, that part’s definitely a head light, and that seems to a be a machine gun (fully loaded, safety off, because why not chance a reckless negligence charge). Then, finally, after they’ve felt out each different part, you pull off the blanket, turn on the light, and show them the full glory of the device they’ve been seeing in bits-and-pieces. The particularly ingenious and experienced friend, of course, may have already divined the object’s nature, but that just means you’ve done a good job (and the reveal is still intriguing).

Unreliable? Narrators

The last big tool I’ll be talking about is characterizing your characters and narrators in order to give your reader an idea of how their perspective is distorted (though besides characterization, simply giving hints as to how much they know about what’s going on, even just letting the reader figure out that Person A definitely can’t know what they claim to know, is an aspect of handling such perspectives). This really comes down to characterizing your primary speakers carefully and clearly which is simple as an idea but complex in practice.

Essentially, the audience has a need to understand the character in proportion to the importance of what the character is communicating. Thus, the guy who offers the protagonist popcorn at the ball game doesn’t usually need much clarification, but any long-term viewpoint character needs to be understood- particularly for full-on narrators.

The audience will need to be able to see the character’s perspective and know him well enough to decipher the reality behind the character’s perspective insofar as knowledge of that reality is necessary to the story you’re telling at the point in the story that the information is conveyed (it gets complicated). You need to consider what the reader knows about the character, what you want the reader to understand of what the character conveys, and what you want to conceal through ignorance of the character (after all, readers understand characters better the farther into the story you get, so you can take advantage of their initial relative ignorance to spell out the truth without them recognizing or understanding it ,whether through lack of context or lack of ability to translate the character’s viewpoints).

As time progresses, you will need to consider the character’s general patterns of deception and what he is or isn’t aware of, including his self-deception and unrealized ignorance. You’ll have to consider how much of this you want to convey to the audience and when- it can be a truly enlightening experience to read stories written by masters of this and realize just how much you missed the first time because you didn’t understand what a character was really saying. For any more-than-slightly unreliable perspective, one that lies or is outright insane, you must decide if and how the audience will twig to the deception or delusion, what tools they will have to see through it and how far you want that vision to penetrate.

For this purpose, you as the author will generally need to sow hints in the narrative: incongruous truths, elements that contradict a character’s perspective, etc. If the character has a delusional or self-deceived understanding of things which stories have to keep the same as reality, like basic human psychology, logic, or morality, the slowly-apparent distortion of these in the perspective can also be an indicator and clue. If you want the truth to be evident, the reader should be able to learn, over time, the pattern of the character’s deceptions, identifying at least the façade, even if the reality underneath is more obscure. Finally, if the reader knows the motives of the character, their frames of reference, and their priorities, the deceptions and delusions will become clearer because the reader will be able to identify the motive which justifies their existence. Just remember, amid all of this, that the character, even if he’s the full-on narrator, must be the one lying; you must be telling the truth when you say that’s what he said.

Plot Twists

Before I leave off, I’d like to say a word about plot twists. Sometimes, plot twists aren’t worth it. Be careful about doing a plot twist just because you can do a plot twist. I’m not going to ramble on about that here (have to keep a topic in reserve, after all). Just remember this: before attempting a surprise reveal, try seeing where playing it straight (or playing it straighter) gets you. A lot of the time, especially for inexperienced authors (like me, sometimes), the twist is frankly unnecessary and doesn’t make the story better (though it definitely makes it more complicated, more contrived, and harder to follow).

Conclusion

These are the two rules of lying to your readers: ‘You don’t lie to them’ and (re-phrased for your convenience) ‘Everything else can lie like a politician up for re-election’. Note that just because it can lie doesn’t mean it should lie, because the flip side of the coin is that you have to tell the truth sometime (or, because the story’s truth is what it says it is, internally, the lie becomes the truth). In fact, almost universally the truth-telling has to be concurrent with or preceding the deception, sitting in the background or sneaking in while the reader is distracted. Sometimes, of course, you’re not doing any deception at all. Sometimes, what you see is what you get. Remember, though, that when you do need to fool the reader, you have a lot of tools to do it, so long as you don’t ruin his trust in you as the author by lying².

God bless.

Footnotes

1 – An excellent book; find a review here.

2 – That would be lazy, which, as usual, means it would be a bad idea on a practical level. Check out last week’s Part One of the two-part series if you want a re-hash on the reason for that.